CC3+ contains a huge amount of various commands and features. This series highlights a number of these. There won't be any special progression to this series, and the command will be selected from the entire range, from the simple basic commands, to more advanced features intended for the more advanced users. Feel free to use this topic to discuss the command presented.This series is called the command of the week, but it could also explain a feature. The explanations will tend to explain the technical parts of the command, and is intended to highlight the basics (and complexities) of the command, and information about how to use it, but won't be a detailed tutorial. It is up to you to use it creatively in your maps.

Week 21 - Named Views

If you have a large map with lots of detail, it you may feel the need to zoom in both to work on the map, and later view and use it. CC3+ has multiple different ways of zooming, but one particularly nice feature is the ability to define a named view in the map, which you can the easily zoom into. For example, you can define important section of your town, such as the royal palace or docks as views, allowing you to instantly zoom to these areas no matter where you are currently zoomed in your map. For more advanced use, you can also create macros/hotspots to let the viewer of the map easily zoom to interesting spots in the map.

Where to find it?

How to use it?

Using this functionality is quite simple:

Zoom into the desired area in your map.

Select View -> Windows -> Name Window. The command line will ask you to pick the window to name. Most people work with only a single view window open, so just click anywhere inside the drawing window. In the dialog that pops up, give the current view a meaningful name. When you click ok, you can notice that the title bar of the drawing widow changes from 'Unnamed View' to showing your new view name.

Later, when you need to go back to this view, either click any zoom button and select Zoom Named, or go to View -> Zooms -> Named...This will cause the command line to read View name [dialog]The easiest here is to just click the mouse button (inside the drawing window). This will bring up a dialog showing all the named views in the map. Note that there are some predefined viewes here, feel free to delete them if you want to. Now, simply select the view you wish to zoom to and hit ok.

Note that the views you define will be saved with the map, so it is great if you distribute the map file.

Advanced Use

You may have noticed that the ZNAME command brought up a command line instead of going straight to the dialog where you choose the view to zoom to. This allows us to use this command as a text-only command. Instead of opening the dialog, you can simply type the desired view directly on the command line. This is especially useful when used in macros, because you can create a hotspot in your map with a macro command to jump to a specific view, for example in a navigation menu for your map. You could also map the command to a button in the CC3+ toolbars, but that is probably overkill unless you have a common naming scheme you use in your maps.For example, the simple macroZNAME Dockswill zoom directly to the view named "Docks" and can be used anywhere you could use a macro.